The competition is being sponsored by the good folks at

Update! Best of Show Pro-Am Brew Prize: And just to prove how great the people at Beau’s brewery are, and how nice they are to us, Beau’s will once again be brewing the Best of Show beer in large scale to the brewery in Vanleek Hill.

Update! Brewer of the Year: The GCHC Competition is now part of the Canadian Brewer of the Year circuit. Your standings in the GCHC will contribute to the national BOTY ranking.

It’ll soon be time to crown the latest Homebrewer of the Year and give the accolades he or she deserves. If you’ve got your eye on winning competitions and one of these years taking home the HotY award, you can learn a few things from last year’s winner, Brad Clifford.

Brad provided us with the secret details of his Great Canadian Homebrew Conference Best of Show winner. If you’re working on your brewing skills, you can learn a lot from Brad and our many other award winners.

The CABA 2012 Anything Goes Competition went spectacularly well, with homebrewers submitted a total of 132 entries from across the country. Thanks to everyone who entered, and congratulations to all of the winners.

CABA would like to thank all of the BJCP judges who took part in the judging prior to the Great Canadian Homebrew Conference. We’d also like to issue a special thank you to Ken Woods of Black Oak Brewery, who once again volunteered his brewery’s space to host the judging event.

Announced at the 2011 CABA AGM on November 19th, the All About Ales Competition results featured beers in 17 overall categories. The 2011 AAA Competition received 104 entries, and we’re proud to announce the winners of each of the categories, as well as our Best of Show winner.

At the Great Canadian Homebrew Conference on Saturday, we announced the winners of the homebrewing competition. With 99 entries across the entire spectrum of BCJP categories, we awarded winners in 12 categories, as well as for Best of Show. Here’s the entire list of winners

It didn’t take long after I started brewing beer before I discovered the joys of swing-top bottles. As I’m sure happened with many new brewers, my first batch (or two?) was bottled exclusively with capped bottles, and the process was slow. I’m fairly certain my first bottling night back in 2007 was about four hours long. Today, that same bottling night is probably about half that in time; and although much of that increased speed can be attributed to a better understanding of the processes involved, some of it is also because of the number of swing-top bottles (mostly Grolsch and Christoffel) that have found their way into my bottle collection one way or the other.

A tip I’ve learned from my new brewing buddy: If you have a local bar or pub that serves beers with swing-top bottles, talk to the manager about buying the swing-top bottles. Some are bound to let them go for the return price. That will increase your swing-top bottle collection quickly and reduce the number of bottle caps you’ll need come bottling day.

As I’ve written about in the CABA Times, one of the things I enjoy about homebrewing is the experimental nature of the hobby (and the hobbyists). Many brewers like to brew to style, and more power to them, but outside of a couple of reasonable attempts to brew to style, I mostly aim for whatever seems like a good idea at the time — and sometimes those ideas lead into such things as my infamous 2007 Christmas ale or my clone of CABA President Kevin Tighe’s jalapeno ale.

The most recent homebrewing experiment I’ve been involved with is with a new homebrewer who has taken an interest in historical beers, as well as in using ingredients from his garden. Looking into his herb garden and doing some research into historical beers, he discovered that prior to the use of hops as a bittering agent, brewers would use whatever they could get their hands on. The one that caught his interest was sage, an herb that is growing out of control in his garden.

This has rekindled my interest in historical beers. Since I started homebrewing three years ago, the one historical bittering agent I’ve really wanted to use is heather (so perhaps you can expect to hear about a heather ale experiment in a future blog post or CABA Times article).